Fuel sensors may be placed within the fuel tanks of aircraft in order to approximate the amount of fuel remaining in the tanks. During flight, the aircraft, along with the fuel tanks and the fuel within the tanks, may experience motion throughout six degrees of freedom (including pitch, roll, and yaw). For some types of aircraft, including high performance fighter aircraft, the fuel within the tanks may be subject to very high velocities and very large gravitational forces, thus causing the fuel within the tanks to shift substantially within the tanks. The placement of the sensors within the fuel tanks may therefore be critical to the accuracy of the fuel measurements, particularly during such extreme flight conditions.
Conventional methods of determining the placement of the sensors within the fuel tanks depend upon trial-and-error techniques. For example, a designer may make a “best guess” placement of the sensors within the fuel tanks. This initial design is then built and tested in a test fixture that simulates actual flight conditions and measures the performance. If this initial design does not provide the required degree of accuracy, the locations of the sensors may be adjusted, and the testing process repeated, until a satisfactory result is obtained.
Although desirable results have been achieved using such conventional methods, the trial-and-error method of determining the locations of the fuel sensors may be expensive, particularly for designs that require a relatively large number of iterations to achieve acceptable sensor locations. The repeated design, fabrication, and testing of fuel tank designs may involve considerable labor costs and may take a substantial amount of time to complete as well. Novel methods for predicting the accuracy of information supplied by sensors within fuel tanks that may reduce or eliminate the expense of the conventional trial-and-error methods would therefore be useful.